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A case in point: On a recent Thursday afternoon, lawmakers shuffled into the second-floor suite in the Cannon House Office Building to tape short speeches for their personal YouTube channels. Committee and office staffers were crammed into a small overheated room working on graphics that can improve the performance of their boss’s Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Rep. Tom Rice was also on hand to host his first Google+ Hangout. As the South Carolina freshman removed his suit jacket, and sat upright on a wooden stool in front of a Mac desktop monitor, the set behind him included a South Carolina flag, his Twitter handle @RepTomRice and a misspelled hashtag “#VAACOUNTABILITY.”

About 10 constituents back in his Myrtle Beach-based district were ready to talk about backlogs at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Then technology did what technology sometimes does: The camera worked but the sound didn’t.

“Can you hear me now?” Rice said over and over, while a couple of GOP staffers who had everything working just right a few minutes before he arrived scrambled for a fix. Joan Stiller, a veteran from Pawleys Island waiting in the chat room, suggested Rice just call her on a cellphone, a simple enough patch that led to a 10-minute conversation beamed out live and also recorded for YouTube.

Except everyone else on the feed can only watch — and not participate themselves.

Turning the House into a more tech-savvy operation is a constant challenge, from the inevitable, unexpected glitches to the benefits of instant communication that compete with the risk of an embarrassing mistake. Institutional forces can also stifle even the best of innovation intentions, like the security concerns preventing lawmakers from using “cloud” storage.

While deeply divided on the political battlefield — Republicans routinely concede their candidates remain far behind President Barack Obama and the Democrats’ data, technology and analytic infrastructure machine — the respective House leadership teams have both embraced the shift toward 21st-century lawmaking as a means to connect with their increasingly connected, though very disenchanted, constituents.

Some of the changes are symbolic. Refurbished to look like a Silicon Valley startup, the GOP Conference’s work space has painted walls easily mistaken for the primary colors of Facebook, Microsoft and Google. Visitors are offered freshly ground coffee from a super-size metallic brewing machine and urged to scribble “what makes America great” on a giant chalkboard mounted in the lobby, all while recharging their cellphones on a “GOP Jolt” station.

But many are also substantive. With a handful of exceptions — wink, wink: Reps. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), John Mica (R-Fla.), Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Tom Petri (R-Wis.) — both parties can claim near universal adoption of social media giant Twitter. On Facebook, even 91-year-old Texas GOP Rep. Ralph Hall recently posted his first selfie, while 83-year-old Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) has uploaded pictures flaunting his “stylish wardrobe.”

“I’ve been encouraged that even the older members that used to carry around beepers, they recognize that the world has changed and they need to be part of it,” said House GOP Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, who called for a sweeping set of technology changes in a December 2008 memo to then-House Minority Leader John Boehner that urged for “Taking the GOP from PC to MAC.”

But rank-and-file members like Rice also offer up poignant reminders that old-school technologies can often still do the trick.

While he waited for the Google+ video chat to start working again, Rice told POLITICO that he gets far more mileage out of telephone town halls for which thousands of people in his district can call in to hear him speak. He recounted a woman in her 80s who approached him at a recent banquet and said, “I thought I liked my last congressman. But you just call me right up on the phone.”

“Those people,” Rice said, “they’re never going to be on Google.”

Both the House GOP and Democrats have actually made big strides when it comes to using technology on the official front, often moving in bipartisan fashion in the name of institutional change and greater transparency.

“We live in an age where if they don’t know you’re doing something, they just assume you’re not doing it,” said Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who recently spoke to a full room of about 70 House Democratic communications directors about social media, urging them to get beyond the journalists who “can’t report everything you say.”